LinkSwarm for February 8, 2019

February 8th, 2019

I’m saving Fauxcahontas and the Virginia Chapter of the Al Jolsen Reenactment Society for the weekend. And for some reason, there’s a lot of jet fighter news in this roundup. [Shrugs]

  • “State Of The Union: Even Democrats Liked Trump’s Speech.”
  • President Donald Trump: Here is everything I’ve accomplished for the black community. MSM: Yes, but are you sensitive?
  • Leftwing it girl Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or, as one Twitter user put it, Alexandria Occasional Cortex) offered up a proposal for a “Green New Deal” that’s equal messaures complete government takeover (and tanking) of the economy and absolute fantasyland. Oh, and it gets rid of every gasoline powered car by 2030, has jobs and free health care for all, and eliminates cow farts. I just hope the line isn’t too long to get my free pony…
  • “The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal.” Including free money for people “unwilling to work.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Related.
  • France conducts a nuclear strike exercise in the wake of the U.S’s INF treaty withdrawal. Message: “Manger de la merde, les Russes.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Speaking of France and Germany, they announced a joint program to develop a next generation fighter jet. Since it’s all of £57 million, which is nothing in fighter development terms, right now it’s more posturing than real. (And see the weekend post on Europe’s defense dilemma if you haven’t already.)
  • Related: No one can shoot down an F-22 or F-35 because no one can see them.
  • Despite that, the Air Force is considering buying more F-15X fighters rather additional than F-35A fighters. The writer considers this a mistake:

    The F-15X is an updated version of the F-15E, and six active duty pilots I have interviewed who have flown both that jet and the F-35 state the former could never survive in a modern day, high-threat environment, and that it would be soundly defeated by an F-35 in almost any type of air-to-air engagement. That strongly suggests buying the F-15X in lieu of the F-35 would be a very poor choice.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Kurt Schlichter notes that we can’t let the Social Justice Warriors win:

    This bizarre, unspoken assumption that someone can’t change and grow up in a third of a century – especially when the evidence is that he or she changed and grew up in a third of a century – is profoundly destructive. It’s designed to allow the SJWs unlimited power to ex post facto decree someone unfit for society at their whim. They will scour a target’s past, decide something regrettable is unforgivable, and demand his or her head. And you just know that the GOP establishment Fredocons are willing to give it up without a fight.

  • Surprise! Extensive links between BDS movement and known terrorist organizations.
  • Bill Weld changes his party registration to primary Donald Trump in 2020. (Glances at needle.) Nope, not even a twitch.
  • “A famous opera singer and his husband have been arrested on suspicion of raping a young singer who claims he was left bleeding from the rectum after blacking out at an after-show party with the pair in Texas, in 2010.” They’re being extradited from Michigan to Texas.
  • They’re adding two toll lanes and one non-toll lane each way on 183 between Mopac and State Highway 45. Because politicians just hate adding non-toll lanes these days…
  • Jill Abramson, former editor of The New York Times, evidently committed numerous incidents of plagiarism in her new book.
  • Shocker: Mayor of Texas city whose residents have seen 30-40% tax increases in the last decade doesn’t want property tax reform.
  • Brit newspaper writer attempts to take on the Super Bowl. Lileks not impressed. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • First Buck-ee’s outside Texas is being sued for having prices that are too low.
  • Kamala Harris Is A Damn Liar

    February 7th, 2019

    Hey, remember all the way back to four days ago, when Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris decried identity politics?

    Or maybe all the way back to last week, where she declared:

    We, as Democrats and progressives, cannot afford to be guilty of putting people in these narrow boxes based on what we have decided is their identity instead of seeing that they have lived full lives. They are full people, as multifaceted as the other people we know.

    Well, guess what?

    Translation: Get back in your narrow box!

    That’s a laundry list of Social Justice Warrior knee-jerk identity politics accusations against anyone opposing their agenda of the moment; the only surprise is slipping in “antisemitism” instead of “Islamophobia.” And by “transphobia” she means people who have the unmitigated gall to believe that there are two biological sexes, determined at the genetic level long before birth. Which, of course, plays such a central course in Russian foreign policy. And I sincerely doubt Russia saw “homophobia” as a weakness, since Russia itself is far from a hotbed of gay rights.

    If Kamala Harris wants to see who is using identity politics to divide America, she should look in a mirror.

    (Think of this as the first of series of “Identity Politics is destroying the Democratic Party” posts. By the time I get to the next one, I assume the past racial sins of 9 or 10 more Virginia Democrats will have been brought to light…)

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s State of the State

    February 6th, 2019

    Since everyone and their dog are talking about President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, I’m counter-programming by offering up Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s State of the State address.

    A transcript can be found here.

    Some super-high level bullet points:

  • The Texas economy is doing gangbusters. “Texas leads the nation in new job creation. And we have the fastest growing economy in America. A by-product of this success is a prosperity that touches all corners of our state. Texas recorded its lowest unemployment rate ever. And wages are rising.”
  • Education needs improvement.
  • Tax reform is a priority.
  • Still recovering from Harvey, and we need to upgrade infrastructure.
  • We need to do more to address gang violence, including on the border.
  • HISD School Board: “A Step Below Hell”

    February 5th, 2019

    Sometimes you link piece because you read it and go “What the hell?” Such is the case with this piece on the Houston Independent School District School Board:

    Three days after the stunning ouster of Houston ISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan in mid-October, an unexpected move that further divided the already-fractured school board, district leaders gathered for training on how to govern.

    Instead, HISD leaders spent four straight hours lobbing blistering accusations of disingenuous, duplicitous and dismissive behavior by their colleagues. Through raised voices and tears, they bemoaned the disintegration of trust and productivity on the board, with one trustee describing his service as “a step below hell” and another likening her experience to “an abusive relationship.”

    The intervention-style airing of grievances, captured on video and reported here for the first time, culminated with Trustee Wanda Adams standing up and yelling at Trustee Elizabeth Santos, angry that board members did not defend her after she received threats while serving as board president in 2017.

    Well, there’s one problem. You’re supposed to hold off of the Festivus Airing of Grievances until December 23.

    “Did y’all come to my defense? Hell no,” Adams shouted as she slowly walked toward Santos, prompting a top Texas Education Agency official in the room to position himself between the two trustees. “So, you want to know how I felt last year? I was quiet the whole year. So, don’t come up here crying ‘woe is me’ when people came to my house, attacked me.”

    Houston ISD Trustee Wanda Adams shouted at fellow board member Elizabeth Santos for about 90 seconds during a mid-October board meeting, slowly walking toward her until Texas Education Agency Deputy Commissioner of Governance AJ Crabill stepped between them. The exchange marked the highest point of tension during a heated meeting in the aftermath of Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan’s unexpected ouster, which was later reversed.

    The remarkably candid meeting laid bare the dysfunction that critics say has weakened the Houston school board’s ability to serve the district’s 213,000 children and prompted calls for major state intervention over the past several months. The turmoil has stalled efforts to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the district, including poor academic performance among many low-income students, inequities in funding between campuses and unstable administrative leadership. Houston ISD leaders also suspect the board’s disharmony has contributed to the district’s largest enrollment decline in 12 years.

    “I have felt like this year (in 2018), there’s been no productive work done by the board,” Trustee Anne Sung said during the October meeting.

    Details of the seven-hour mid-October meeting have not been publicly disclosed until now, largely because it was not attended by local media and HISD officials did not post video of the meeting online. The Houston Chronicle obtained a copy of the video through a public records request.

    The video depicts a beaten-down board compromised by grudges, clashing personalities and heightened suspicions. Some trustees have said they were unaware they were being recorded during the meeting, resulting in an unfiltered look at the fragmented board.

    Houston ISD Trustee Anne Sung explained to colleagues the frustration she felt in 2018 while serving on the school board, as well as part of her rationale for voting to replace Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan.

    “There’s so much back-biting and back-stabbing and all of these little freaking agendas,” then-Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones said during the meeting. “Every single freaking person here contributed to that. And until we take responsibility for that, it’s not going to change. And the public sees that. They see right through us.”

    The articles portrays a school board at each other’s throats, with the biggest battles about personal respect rather than what’s best for students. It’s like an episode of one of those reality talk shows where poor people scream at each other for an hour. Except these people oversee the eighth largest school district in the country.

    The relative inaction does not bode well for HISD’s prospects of maintaining local control over the district. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath has had legal authority to replace the district’s school board since September 2017, the result of HISD’s inability to prove strong governance practices and improve academics at long-struggling schools. Morath has not exercised that option, but Gov. Greg Abbott’s blistering comments about the district’s leadership last month — a “disaster,” he tweeted — and a fresh state investigation into potential Open Meetings Act violations by several trustees raises the stakes for HISD.

    Even if Morath resists pulling the takeover trigger, chronically low performance at four campuses could prompt a legally required state takeover of the board later this year.

    Snip.

    The school board has been riddled with distrust and in-fighting for years, often cutting across the class, ethnic and racial lines that cleave the diverse district. The interpersonal grievances frequently are well known in local education circles but less visible to the public.

    The mid-October meeting, however, illustrates how the current iteration of the board — three new members were seated to begin 2018 — became Houston’s most maligned governing group.

    One by one, trustees voiced frustration with fellow board members or the district administration, accusing colleagues of undermining them, distorting the truth or offering inadequate support.

    Skillern-Jones, for example, spent several minutes criticizing nearly all of the trustees for failing to defend her leadership in 2018, noting that she reluctantly assumed the presidency after Trustee Jolanda Jones scuttled Sung’s candidacy. Skillern-Jones drew flak in April when she ordered HISD police to clear the audience from the room during a raucous board meeting, which precipitated the arrests of two women.

    Me me me me me.

    I believe in subsidiarity, the idea that power should devolve to the lowest level of government possible, but it may very well be time for the state to take over HISD.

    (Hat tip: Holly Hansen’s Twitter feed. I also noticed that Holly has a new blog that wasn’t on the blogroll, a situation I’ve now rectified.)

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for February 4, 2019

    February 4th, 2019

    This week in the clown car update: Spartacus is In and LA mayor Eric Garcetti is Out. Oh, and Oprah’s spiritual advisor joined the race, because why the hell not?

    This is the point in campaign cycles when key campaign staffers and donors stop returning the calls of undeclared longshots, either joining up with a declared campaign or waiting for a bigger fish (“Sure, Mike, I think you’d make a great President, but old Joe Biden and I go way back…”). Biden can wait. Bloomberg can wait. O’Rourke has enough residual fawning media afterglow and a big enough contributor list that he can probably wait as well. Beyond them, the train has already sounded the whistle and announced final boarding. There will be another one along in 2023…

    An Emerson poll shows that only Biden beats President Donald Trump in Iowa, while Trump beats everyone else. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says that internal polling shows him in double digits. The problem, of course, is that “internal polls” are always garbage.

    538’s weekly roundup. And National Review‘s Jim Geraghty sorts the Democratic candidates by age. “To get a sense of the generational difference, when Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate, Buttigieg, Gabbard, and Castro had not been born yet and O’Rourke was two months old.”

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Probably Out. She’s been tapped to give the Democrats state of the union response to President Donald Trump. I have to admit that it would be hilarious if she used the time to launch her own Presidential campaign…
  • Creepy Porn lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Maybe. All quiet on the Bennet front.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. Did Biden embrace segregation in 1975? Will being Obama’s Veep inoculate him from charges of racism? We all know the answer to that: If you’re inconvenient for Social Justice Warriors, nothing inoculates you from charges of racism.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Making noises like he’s getting in. “Michael Bloomberg’s Secret Plans to Take Down Trump.” Can’t be very secret if it’s in The Atlantic, now can it?

    Michael Bloomberg has bigger plans for 2020 than running for president. The billionaire and former New York City mayor has been openly dreaming of the White House for 25 years, and spent huge amounts of time and money four times over the past 10 years trying to figure out a way to get himself there.

    But he has hesitations about this race, too. He’s not sure there is a realistic space in the Democratic primaries for his centrist record. And he almost certainly won’t run if Joe Biden does, members of his team believe.

    Note that “centrist” has now come to mean “not completely insane on law and order issues” in Democratic circles…

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Website. Twitter. Spartacus is in. I predict we see a vicious series of attacks against Booker from a mainstream media desperate to keep him from eating into anointed favorite Kamala Harris’ base. Upgrade from Probably In.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Probably running. He’s calling Trump a racist, so it sounds like he’s already in mid-season far-left pandering form.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Appeared on ABC’s This Week. Might have peaked upon announcement.
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. In an interview with New York magazine, he says the race is all about immigration, Because Trump. I’m sure he wishes it was, but I bet Democratic strategists who can actually read polls dread seeing that happen…
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not. Never mind what Hillary herself said last week, Clinton toady John Podesta says she’s not running. Back in the crypt, Grandma Death. Downgrade from “Maybe.”
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. New York Times notices that the appetite for De Blasio rivals the popularity of [spins pop culture reference wheel] New Coke. Assuming the pitchman was still Bill Cosby…
  • Maryland Representative John K. Delaney: In. He was on Iowa public television, sounding disturbingly normal by Democratic Party chances, so I can only assume he’s toast.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. This week’s obligatory MSM “Tulsi Gabbard is doomed” piece comes via Politico, who claim her campaign is in “disarray.” You know, just like the all those 2017 stories on the Trump White House. Glenn Greenwald goes on to debunk another NBC hit piece: “NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party.”
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out. “This is where I want to be, and this is a place where we have so much exciting work to finish.”
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Out. Just joined CNN. A downgrade from “Probably Out.”
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Traveling to Iowa.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter feed. She’s fundraising in Hollywood (where “she disavowed ‘identity politics,'” which I’m guessing doesn’t include any of the leftwing kinds), and the latest fawning profile comes via the Washington Post.
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Probably in. Says he’s the guy to beat Trump rather than someone “far left.” Compared to any field but this one, Hickenlooper himself is pretty far left himself…
  • Addition: Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder: Leaning toward a run. Didn’t want to add him, but he’s speaking in Iowa. Maybe threatening to take votes away from Kamala Harris is the only way to get the MSM to do honest reporting on Fast And Furious…
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. He’s very, very upset that Schultz is considering running as an Independent than as a Democrat.
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Leaning toward In. Get’s a semi-fawning profile from NeverTrumper George Will, with a slam at “skateboarding man-child” Beto O’Rourke along the way.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Maybe? Zero buzz.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run. Says he would “like to” run and will make a decision by March 31.”
  • Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley: Maybe.
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? Showed up in new Hampshire to give a speech only to shrug off questions about why he was there.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Out.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Maybe? He evidently stopped raising money months ago. Also:

    A Facebook Live chat he did in response to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration earlier this month began with about 2,600 viewers. By the end, after an hour of him walking around his El Paso neighborhood trying to show the calm reality of a border town, and looking at the decorations in friends’ homes, and then sitting on a couch and chatting at length, the viewers steadily dropped to just over 1,000.

  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan: Doubtful. He’s not even in that 538 roundup.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: All but In. Unnamed sources say he’s running.
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning toward In. “I’m close to making a decision. I’ll be in New Hampshire tomorrow, so I’m excited for that.” Yes, nothing says “excitement” like midwinter New Hampshire…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. “Elizabeth Warren plans tour of eastern Iowa towns after ‘big announcement’ in her home state.”
  • Addition: Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. So let me get this straight: Oprah’s not running, but her spiritual advisor is? She most recently placed fourth in a California congressional race, but Team Kamala must be shitting bricks at the possibility that Oprah might endorse her.
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares. Twitter. Facebook. I will say he has a lot of events on his calendar
  • Punxsutawney Phil Says Six More Weeks of Northam

    February 3rd, 2019

    Virginia’s Democratic Governor Ralph Northam has had a bad week.

    First he comes out for post-natal abortion, then tries to walk it back, and then it turns out that he appeared in either a Klan outfit or blackface back in medical school, an event immortalized in his yearbook photos.

    Immediately liberals tried to draw comparison with the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight. (Or, even stupider, the Billy Bush tape, because they still haven’t gotten over how that “bombshell” failed to derail Trump’s campaign.) Except for the tiny detail that Northam’s offense to current norms is real, and those of Kavanaugh were entirely made up. If Kavanaugh had worn blackface, we all know he would have been forced to withdraw his nomination. But the rules are always different for Democrats.

    Oh, and in college before med school, his friends called him “coonman.” Because that’s a perfectly normal nickname for a random white person to have.

    After all that, Northam set out to prove that there’s no political crisis that you can’t make worse by lying about it.

    First he apologized for the photo, then, the next day, claimed that he wasn’t in the photo but did dress in blackface on another occasion, namely a Michael Jackson contest.

    The problem with Northam’s new modified limited hangout is the sheer stupidity of actually making things worse and less believable. So it took him three decades before he noticed an offensive photo on a two page yearbook spread that wasn’t him? Think he maybe should have addressed that a wee bit earlier? “Wow, I’ve never been in blackface or a Klan outfit! Should I tell the yearbook staff they goofed? Naaaaahhhhhhhh….”

    The cherry on the top: Back in the 2017 gubernatorial election, Northam allies ran on painting opponent Ed Gillespie and Republicans as racists, including an ad where a pickup truck with a Gillespie sticker flying a confederate flag literally tries to run over black children:

    Now Northam is steadfastly insisting he won’t resign despite numerous calls for him to from across the political spectrum. That’s probably the ideal outcome…for Republicans.

    Do I believe people should resign over something stupid in their yearbook photos from 30 years ago? No. But do I believe that elected Democrats should resign over same? Awww, hell yes! Democrats have been the ones enabling the Social Justice Warrior mob outrage rules lo these many years, so now they can live by them. Only when they’re forced to live by their own rules will the rules change.

    Some related Tweets:

    Europe’s Dysfunctional Defense Dilemma

    February 2nd, 2019

    Warfare is an endemic part of the human condition, but for at least two millennia, Europeans were the defining practitioners of it. From Alexander the Great and the Roman legions up through the Napoleonic Wars and the Blitzkrieg, Europe was at the forefront of finding new, innovative ways of killing people on a massive scale.

    Now the continent that defined warfare can’t figure out how to defend itself. Or, more accurately, they know how to do it but are singularly unwilling to spend the necessary money. For decades, Europe has let the United States do the heavy lifting on defense spending, with most nations falling below the 2% of GDP funding level called called for by NATO. (Only the United States, the UK, Greece, Estonia and Latvia met that threshold last year, with Poland and Lithuania just barely missing it.) It seems that stagnant economies and cradle-to-grave welfare states make adequate defense spending democratically unpopular in most of the EU.

    Many U.S. administrations have grumbled abut this. Only President Donald Trump grumbled about it loudly enough to make progress on the issue:

    NATO states have agreed to increase their defense spending by $100 billion over two years after President Trump went on a fiery tirade last July – calling on “delinquent” countries to boost their contributions by 2% to 4% of GDP. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance heard Trump’s call “loud and clear” and that member nations are “stepping up,” according to the Telegraph.

    Right now these are only promises; it remains to be seen if the various European nations will carry-through.

    Weirdly, at the same time Trump was pushing for adequate funding for NATO, France and Germany were signing a treaty proclaiming that they were the same country, at least as far as foreign and defense policy were concerned:

    Europe’s most powerful personages on Tuesday signed a treaty for the “unification,” of Western Europe’s biggest countries. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel inked the deal at Aachen/Aix la Chapelle. It was there in the chapel that Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer had knelt at Holy Mass to celebrate the signing of the 1963 Franco-German treaty of cooperation that sealed their peoples’ vow of friendship and cooperation. In the ensuing half century, it produced just that. France and Germany became the core of the Common Market and then of the European Union.

    Today’s treaty, its pretensions notwithstanding, is between regimes that are overwhelmingly occupied trying, with decreasing success, to fend off domestic challenges to their legitimacy. The treaty is a desperate attempt by France and Germany to change the subject from their internal struggles. Nevertheless, the treaty cannot but have major and deleterious effects on intra-European relations as well as on relations between Europe and the United States.

    In 1963, de Gaulle and Adenauer had hoped for even greater coordination in foreign and defense policy as well but, under U.S. diplomatic pressure, the German Bundestag added a clause to the treaty’s ratification that privileged the Federal Republic’s defense relationship with America. By contrast, the 2019 treaty’s main thrust is to sever that clause. The two countries will act “as a single unit with regard to relations with third countries.”

    Lest there be any doubt, the final sentence reads: “The admission of the Federal Republic of Germany as a permanent member of of the United Nations Security Council [where it would share France’s seat] is a priority of Franco-German diplomacy.”

    For other European countries, and for the United States, Macron and Merkel’s real domestic worries matter far less than the fact that, henceforth, the European core’s main weight will be wielded in unison.

    Rules notwithstanding, the EU never was a club of equals. As the years passed, and especially after the advent of the Euro and the European Central Bank, Germany became primus inter pares, and then more to the point, other states learned that Berlin was the place to ask for EU favors, and Germans the folks to blame for not getting them. Henceforth, with Berlin and Paris jointly at the helm, other countries will wonder whether asking or blaming will be of any use. The EU will do whatever the two will dictate to Brussels from their joint councils of ministers.

    Snip.

    In sum, the new Franco-German core is sure further to erode the EU, NATO, and the United Nations. But even as the French and German alliance is poised to disrupt so many international institutions, it is soft inside because it arises from both regimes’ alienation from their own peoples.

    Neither has France’s Macron found, nor is he likely to find, a way of appeasing the anger that the French people, via the “yellow vest” movement, have demonstrated for the way they have been governed for a half century; nor have Merkel and her allies on the traditional Left and Right been able to stanch the hemorrhaging of their electoral support, for reasons that differ little from those that motivate France’s yellow vests. France’s 1958 Fifth Republic constitution and Germany’s 1949 Grundgesetz largely insulate the respective governments from immediate popular pressure. But these governments’ alienation from their citizens is substantive and cultural. It is not such as can be healed by time—or by treaties.

    Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and the people then in leadership positions in their countries were in basic sympathy with their peoples’ civilization. They wanted to keep France French and Germany German. As Catholics, the notion of enforcing the religion of “global warming” would have been repugnant to them, as would any of the current, ever-changing dictates of “political correctness.” They did not imagine themselves regulators of energy usage or of the details of life. As nationalists, they rejected the notion of supranational institutions beyond the peoples’ electoral control.

    In all these regards, Merkel and Macron, and their recent predecessors, have abandoned their peoples. The abandonment is mutual. Consequently, their regimes are rotting. On January 22 they took another step that transfers this rot to the international institutions of which their countries are part.

    France has long pushed for a “European” military structure apart from NATO, and now it may (theoretically) have the political framework to actually carry it out.

    (But wait, you ask: What about that “European Defence Union?” Indeed, that does exist, in the form of the Common Security and Defence Policy under the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, bringing with it a host of other organizations and acronyms dwelling between national military command hierarchies and the EU’s luxuriant tangle of bureaucracy. Never doubt, citizen, that many connected Europeans are being paid extremely well to man the bureaucratic barricades of the CSDP…)

    The irony, however, is that after more than a century of being on the losing end of Germany military might, France’s new military best buddy now sucks at war:

    The biggest problem that Bundeswehr soldiers complained about was the lack of equipment, despite repeated government promises, dating back to a 2014 NATO summit, of a change in direction. That does not count as a surprising development, considering the barrage of poor press the German military has been facing.

    Heavy machinery was a particular concern: [Hans-Peter] Bartels found that often less than 50 percent of the Bundeswehr’s tanks, ships and aircraft were available at any one time, either for training or operational purposes.

    “Spare parts are still missing; maintenance in industry is dragging; the training programs are suffering,” Social Democrat Bartels said. “An absolute must is the acceleration of procurement.” (…)

    Another worry for the Defense Ministry is the stagnation of its post-conscription recruitment drive, which began after Germany scrapped national service in 2011. Though the Bundeswehr is expanding overall (the report found a net gain of 4,000 professional soldiers), most of these were won by extending existing contracts. In other words, the German military is aging.

    (Previously.)

    The further irony is that, while Merkel and Macron signed the treaty, it may very well be National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Alternative for Germany’s leaders like Alice Weidel who inherit it.

    In a parallel development, President Trump has informed Moscow that the United States is pulling out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. American deployment of nuclear-capable Pershing missiles in Europe were, along with SDI, key elements in forcing the Soviet Union to the bargaining table in the 1980s, but Russia has been cheating on it, and the treaty outlived its usefulness.

    Speaking of outliving its usefulness, America’s political establishment seems desperate to avoid debating whether NATO itself has outlived its usefulness. The old adage “Keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down” no longer seems to apply. Russia still has ample nuclear weapons and a formidable conventional force, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While Vladimir Putin shows every sign of being willing to to bite more chunks off Ukraine (and I wouldn’t put trying to reconquer the Baltic countries past him), they can’t afford to deploy their next generation weapons in sufficient numbers, their navy is in a world of hurt, and their adventurism in Syria is looking more and more like costly overreach.

    This piece in National Review argues that (among other things):

    The irony is that the Trump administration actually has a success story to tell about its policies toward NATO and Russia, particularly in Europe. Under this administration, the U.S. has provided lethal aid to Ukraine to fight off Russian-backed insurgents. It has made no concessions to Moscow regarding that conflict. It has increased sanctions against Russia and boosted America’s military presence in Eastern Europe.

    All that is mostly true, except for the tiny, inconvenient facts that the “Russian-backed insurgents” include significant components of the Russian army and that all these efforts have been singularly ineffective at actually expelling Russian forces from Ukraine. This is not exactly a textbook definition of “success.”

    I’m willing to be persuaded that NATO is still a vital alliance, but the arguments I’ve seen thus far are not doing it. And letting Turkey remain a member while its Islamist government remains at cross-purposes to NATO’s stated goals is counterproductive.

    With a few exceptions, Europe’s transnational elites will continue to skimp on defense in order to continue feeding the maw of their failing welfare states as long as the United States lets them. And despite some moderate successes by the Trump Administration, I don’t see that dysfunctional dynamic changing as long as those same functionaries remain in charge.

    LinkSwarm for February 1, 2019

    February 1st, 2019

    I know many of you don’t want to hear it, but here in Texas we’re enjoying a comparatively mild winter…

  • Why President Donald Trump will win the wall fight:

    Trump has, however, suggested that he may well go the emergency route if Pelosi and Schumer remain intransigent: “We can call a national emergency. I haven’t done it. I may do it.… It’s another way of doing it.” The standard line trotted out by the Democrats and the media when the President alludes to an emergency declaration is that a phalanx of pettifoggers will contrive to tie it up in the courts indefinitely. This has even been repeated by conservative pundits. According to Professor Turley, however, “Courts generally have deferred to the judgments of presidents on the basis for such national emergencies, and dozens of such declarations have been made without serious judicial review.”

    All of which means that there is no practical way for the Democrats to stop Trump from getting his wall. He will make a sound, statesmanlike case for it to the nation during the State of the Union address — just 10 days before the deadline to avoid another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi will be scowling behind him, still smarting from the beating she received in the polls from the last shutdown and the hectoring to which she has no doubt been subjected from vulnerable members whose constituents are tired of, “NO.” Then, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver the Dem SOTU response and characterize Trump’s wall using the usual tired clichés about racism.

    In other words, Trump will have been presidential. He will have delivered all manner of good news about the economy, deregulation, health care, foreign policy, and will have laid out a plan for the wall. The Democrats will have offered identity politics, obstruction, investigations, and magical thinking on policy. Pelosi will at length decide it’s smarter to ignore the crazies in her caucus, give Trump something that he can call a “win” on the wall, and move on to something else… anything else. And all the TDS victims and Never Trumpers will demand to know what happened to their bête noire.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • What a fully-funded border protection system looks like.
  • Shot: “Trump has opportunity to flip the 9th Circuit, so why isn’t he?”
  • Chaser: “Trump heard the conservative media outcry, nominates three judges for 9th Circuit.” That’s some swift course-correction…
  • Charlie Martin looks at big media’s very bad week.
  • Newseum closing. “Look on my works, ye mighty…”
  • Old and Busted: “Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The New Coldness: Mail delivery in Minnesota cancelled due to cold.
  • Related:

    In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years. In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago – over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).

    Stop and think about that – if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn’t there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently? What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.

  • Heh:

  • “A shocking report from the Texas Secretary of State last week revealed 95,000 individuals identified in the Texas Department of Public Safety database as non-U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Texas — and 58,000 of those have voted in one or more Texas election since 1996.”
  • Newly seated Texas congressman Chip Roy isn’t backing down.
  • Four Houston police officers shot serving a narcotics warrant in southeast Houston.
  • Houston Police union honcho says that hands up, don’t shoot is to blame. Sounds like there may be a lot of blame to go around, including the possibility of excessive force for a narcotics raid.
  • Cop killer executed after thirty years on death row.
  • Texans may enjoy real property tax reform soon. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you have a speaker working for conservative goals, rather than against them…
  • “Public documents obtained by a Portland attorney reveal that Portland Public School staff, planned, executed and paid for what the media and the school district branded as a ‘student’ anti-Second Amendment protest last March 14th.” Sounds like they should be charged with embezzlement. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Worth a chuckle:

  • The negative startup economics of Buzzfeed:

    In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!

    BuzzFeed has been burning through cash at a rate of $75 million a year and you might think that at some point their investors would become impatient waiting for this operation to show some prospect of making a return on their investment.

  • Heh:

  • “The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.” There’s a reason they have shakedown cruises, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll work out the bugs and get the electromagnetic catapult systems working properly. But at $13 billion, the cost-benefit analysis of additional aircraft carriers starts to get very tricky vs. say, four cheaper ships capable of launching 1,000 semi-autonomous drones each. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Rand Paul’s attacker finds out that assaulting people over political differences is a money-losing proposition.
  • Did Israeli scientists develop a cure for cancer? Let’s hope so…
  • Was Michael Jackson a child diddler?
  • Three Charged for Working With Serial Swatter.”
  • Robert Stacy McCain talks about Tom Wolfe, Junior Johnson, and the decline of journalism:

    Now, Tom Wolfe was a genuine intellectual — he had a Ph.D. from Princeton, for crying out loud — but he was also a Southerner, a native of Virginia, and unlike so many other journalists who have written about the South, he had sympathy for the people he wrote about. He wasn’t out to write an exposé or to do what is nowadays called “investigative journalism,” but sought to explain the folkways of small-town Appalachia to the urban sophisticates who read Esquire, to make the reader see how wholesome and quintessentially American these people really were.

    If you want to know why nobody gives a damn about magazines like Esquire anymore, it’s because the progressive politics of the 21st century forbid any sympathy for the kind of people who like NASCAR. Everything in big-league journalism now is about left-wing politics, more or less, and because North Carolina rednecks probably aren’t too excited about the Left’s agenda of open borders and transgender rights and all that, there is zero possibility a latter-day Tom Wolfe could get any New York-based magazine to publish an article like “The Last American Hero.”

    The whole thing is basically a celebration of toxic masculinity, as the Gender Studies majors would say. Junior Johnson was not one of these “sensitive” modern guys, but a big muscular fellow who thrived on ferocious competition in one of the most masculine of sports.

    He also quotes part of my favorite passage from Wolfe’s celebrated essay, about courage being one of Appalachia’s exportable commodities:

    In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.

  • The coming Google+pocalypse.
  • Feminists aren’t just angry, they ignore facts that disagree with their preexisting anger.
  • This guy should make you feel a lot better about your own obscure collecting hobby.
  • No Deal Brexit?

    January 31st, 2019

    In a turn of events that looked impossible, the UK may be headed for a no deal Brexit:

    In the latest thrilling parliamentary episode of Brexit, the hopes and expectations of, among other Remainers, House of Commons speaker John Bercow were largely disappointed, and the hopes of Brexiteers began to rise again. That was not supposed to happen.

    Before the actual votes on seven amendments to a government motion supporting Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union, it was generally expected that some would pass and either delay the date of Brexit, or transfer control of parliamentary business from cabinet ministers to a coalition of Remainers, or allow MPs to choose among several alternative versions of Brexit. All of these were departures from usual parliamentary conventions — which Bercow had approved, contrary to both precedent and his duty of impartiality — and almost all represented a reversal of what a vast majority of MPs had voted for a year ago. Most significantly, however, they would all have had the intended effect of delaying Brexit indefinitely and likely canceling it altogether.

    That was expected because it has become conventional wisdom that a House of Commons with a Remainer majority would inevitably vote only for a Brexit tolerable to the Remainers and thus disappointing to Leavers. It very much didn’t turn out that way. Of the seven amendments, the five most hostile ones were defeated, all by healthy majorities. The two amendments that did pass were (1) the Brady amendment, which the government had accepted as a way of keeping May’s plan alive, and (2) a non-binding amendment calling for the government not to pursue a No Deal Brexit but not providing any means to prevent it.

    The latter is an example of a rule I’ve just discovered: “Votes that matter matter more than votes that don’t matter.” It’s been very easy for Remainer MPs to posture as principled opponents of Brexit when only other MPs were paying attention and Remainer cabinet ministers were quietly cheering them on. Remain seemed to be gaining ground, and its parliamentary advocates were almost blasé about reversing the referendum result. But the high-octane Brexit debate in the media and the campaign by Remainers to erect clever parliamentary obstacles to its realization meant that more and more voters were paying attention. One effect has been that public support for a No Deal Brexit — in which the U.K. would trade with the EU on World Trade Organization terms, rather than through a separate trade deal — has been rising since Christmas. In two successive BBC Question Time programs, the audience cheered when a lonely Leaver on the five-person panel demanded a simple No Deal departure. And both ministers and whips began to fear that a defeat would weaken the government on more than Brexit.

    Under this combined public and party pressure, the rebels shrank in numbers and the government survived.

    The practical effect of the Brady amendment was a modest one: to unite the Tories around a policy of sending May back to Brussels to ask for a time limit on the so-called Northern Ireland backstop (which would keep the U.K. in the EU customs union in order to avoid a hard border in Ireland). She herself is time-limited; she has two weeks to get this concession. Already the grand EU panjandrums have issued statements saying it’s out of the question. Very likely they are determined to hold that line. If so, May will come back either empty-handed or with some agreeable form of words — “ideally we would like the backstop to be temporary” — that she would try to sell to her party.

    Remainers are painting all sorts of unlikely nightmare scenarios, from the specter of a “no-food Brexit” (because farmers and food companies hate selling food to willing customers, customs union or no customs union) or NHS being unable to buy drugs (because drug companies are notably unwilling to sell their product).

    Oh, and Brussels wants the exit money May foolishly agreed to, even if Parliament rejects the deal. People in Hell want icewater, too…

    Some related tweets. On the contempt the UK’s political class shows to voters:

    Nigel Farage:

    A Remainer who would now vote Leave:

    Pat Condell:

    And don’t forget the onions:

    Venezuela: “It’s About Food”

    January 30th, 2019

    For those deluded leftists who think the Venezuela crises is about a “right wing coup,” take a look at this on-the-scene report from Trump-hostile CNN:

  • “It’s about food. It’s about the startling mismanagment and corruption of the Nicolas Maduro government, and how that’s left people unable to get the daily things you and I take for granted. Water. Dinner. Breakfast.”
  • Car queue three days for gas.
  • “There’s a queue for everything, everywhere.”
  • “We beg for a piece of chicken skin to take home.”
  • “In a socialist utopia that now leaves nearly every stomach empty.”
  • “What they really need is for the military to switch sides.”
  • “We’re beggers now. It isn’t political. It’s survival.”
  • Watch the whole thing.

    In other Venezuela news, the Trump Administration has handed control of Venezuela’s bank accounts in the United States to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido and slapped sanctions on Venezuela’s state owned oil company, including three U.S. Citgo refineries.